Press
release 30 May 2011 – can be downloaded from: www.aidoh.dk/GB-History2011
Appeal to the press, artists, working places, libraries,
universities,
and other institutions of education
Give the Chinese students
their history back!
Help mark the 22nd anniversary of the Tiananmen
massacre. In 1989 the Chinese students occupied the Tiananmen Square in
Beijing for months in an attempt to press the Chinese government to take steps
towards democracy and to fight against corruption. But on 4th June
1989 the regime threw in the army against the unarmed students.
Give the Chinese their story
back. The story is banned in China, but all the students’ newspaper articles,
fliers etc. have been collected by the democracy movement in Hong Kong. These collections of Chinese and
English documents have now been put on the Internet from where they can be downloaded for free.
Many of the young dissidents
were imprisoned in the wake of the crackdown. Some are still in jail but
they are no longer young. China still practises a massive censorship on
information on the massacre. And it is impossible for Chinese people to obtain
uncensored information about the event.
In China the encroachments continue. The famous artist Ai Weiwei has recently been
jailed. Guggenheim has launched a petition
to set him free. The imprisonment of Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo is maintained and his
wife has been put under house arrest.
Thousands of Chinese students are today studying at universities and other institutions
of education in the West. Most of them do not even know their own history due
to the censorship. You can help to remedy this.
·
Therefore we invite
all pro-democracy institutions, scholars and working colleagues to download
and print out this documentation or burn it on a CD. Place it on the shelves of
libraries and hand it out as a gift to Chinese students on 4th June,
the anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre.
·
This way we can
make a contribution to preserve the memory of the victims and maybe inspire
a new generation of Chinese to see democracy as a possibility for China.
We call on everybody to
support this initiative and to mail this appeal to other institutions of
education where there are Chinese students or others who might be interested in
preserving and distributing the knowledge about the Tiananmen massacre.
The initiative of this appeal and informative
campaign is a co-operation between the democracy movement in Hong Kong and
Danish sculptor Jens Galschiot who in 1997 put up an
This year Jens Galschiot has decided not to go
to Hong Kong to join the commemoration
ahead of the 22nd anniversary of the crackdown. On two occasions
Hong Kong’s immigration authorities have refused his entry without justification.
So he will not risk once again booking an expensive ticket and enduring a troublesome
24 hours flight and 6 hours of interrogation just to be sent back immediately
with the first plane.
It seems that China’s curbing
of free speech has got a solid grip, also in Hong Kong. Galschiot is just one
of many critics who have been denied entry. So the city is deprived of a
cultural exchange that is taken for granted in all open democratic societies.
The expulsions are a strident
violation of the principle of ‘One country – Two systems’ that was guarantied
ahead of Hong Kong’s reunion with China in ‘97.
Useful
links:
Download
the documents about Tiananmen 1989: http://www.aidoh.dk/Tiananmen89
Galschiot’s activities related to China: http://www.aidoh.dk/China-Activities
Guggenheim’s petition: www.aidoh.dk/Ai-Petition
The democracy movement in Hong Kong:
HK Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements
of China
E-mail: contact@alliance.org.hk, internet: www.alliance.org.hk/english/index.html, Phone: +852 2782 6111
Contact
Jens Galschiot: E-mail: aidoh@aidoh.dk, internet: www.aidoh.dk, tel. +45 6618 4058, Banevaenget
22, DK-5270 Odense N